Small-Town Redemption

Women. They never knew when to leave a man alone.

He rolled off the bed, yanked the window open, then flopped onto his stomach. All the cool breeze did was blow around her phantom scent so he pulled the pillow over his head. He tossed and turned for what seemed like hours, the memory of Charlotte standing before him in nothing but jeans and a bra imprinting itself in his mind. When he finally, gratefully, fell asleep, he dreamed of her. Of her long legs, bright hair and wary eyes.

And when he woke, hard and aching for her, he could have sworn he still tasted the whisper of her kiss on his lips.

CHAPTER TWO

Seven months later

BEHIND THE BAR, Kane wiped his hands on the towel he kept in his back pocket. Julie Moffat, law student by day and kick-ass waitress by night, wove her way through the crowd at O’Riley’s, a tray of cosmos in her raised hand. She delivered the drinks to a table of coeds celebrating a twenty-first birthday, said something to the girls then nodded toward the corner where two dudes raised their beers in a toast. By the time the girls smiled their thanks to the guys, Julie was back at the bar.

“I need four margaritas,” she told Sadie, “two regular, one of those no salt. One strawberry, the other pomegranate, both blended. And four shots of Cuervo.”

Sadie, already pouring tequila into the blender, raised her eyebrows. “Sympathizing, celebrating or just loosening inhibitions?”

“They’re celebrating,” Julie said with a nod toward the four middle-aged women at a booth by the dartboard. “The blonde in the mom jeans got some big promotion, finally getting out from under the ass-hat supervisor she’s had to deal with for the past five years.”

“Good triumphs over evil.” Sadie raised the bottle in a toast before setting it on the counter. “I love when that happens.”

Kane handed a customer two bottles of Corona, a lime quarter wedged in each one. “Give the ladies that round on the house,” he told Julie.

“Will do.” And with that, she and her asymmetrical dark hair and neck tattoo were off again.

Sadie poured herself a glass of ginger ale. “While I have your attention—”

“You don’t have my attention.” He pointedly took in her cheetah-print dress, the snug material hugging her curves. “But PETA called. They’d like to talk to you about that outfit.”

“Oh, ha-ha. Such wit. Ease your mind, my little animal advocate. No cheetahs were injured during the making of this dress.”

“Maybe not, but you’ve blinded half the people in here with those tights.”

She glanced down at the neon pink covering her legs. Grinned. “Just trying to bring a little bit of brightness to this dreary place. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do so next weekend as I need it off. That’s the whole weekend—two days. Two. Don’t try to schedule me for Saturday night and then claim you thought I meant only Friday.”

“You don’t seem to get how this works,” he said. “I’m the boss. I write the paychecks. I make the rules.”

And holy shit, but he had sounded just like his father.

“Yes, yes,” Sadie agreed pushing her fluffy blond hair from her shoulder. “You’re the big boss man. You have all the power in this relationship while I am just an employee, et cetera and so forth.”

“Glad you finally see things my way.”

“And as your employee, I’m giving you advance notice that I will be unable to work next weekend.”

“No.”

“You don’t seem to get how this works,” she said, throwing his words back at him with a sunny grin that made his left eye twitch. “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you I’m not working next weekend. James and I are going out of town.”

Sadie and James had become an official couple not long after Kane kicked Sadie and Charlotte out of his apartment last fall. They lived together. Why did they have to go out of town?

“You have to work.” He kept his tone calm. No sense losing his temper or his control. Though dealing with Sadie Nixon would be enough to make the most patient man lose his cool. “I already gave Mary Susan the weekend off so she could drive down to see her granddaughter in some school play.”

Sadie patted his arm, all faux conciliatory, as if the headache he’d developed wasn’t entirely her fault. “You’ll figure something out.”

“Do I have any other choice?”

Frowning, she pursed her mouth as if she seriously considered his question. “You could always close the bar. Hey, you could take a little vacation yourself. You haven’t had a day off since I started working here.”

He finished his water, tossed the empty bottle into the recycling bin. “You take enough days off for both of us.”

“So fire me.”

It was one of her favorite rejoinders, one she used mostly because she knew damn well he had no intention of doing it. He hated having anyone read him so clearly. If people knew you too well, they had the power to use that knowledge against you.

“Don’t think I’m not considering it.”

She laughed loudly, the sound somehow rising above the bar’s din. Several people—mostly men because, hey, pretty blonde in a tight, low-cut dress—glanced their way. “Oh, you slay me. You really do.”

“What’s so funny?” Bryce Gow, a heavyset elderly man with red cheeks and a bulbous nose, asked as he hefted himself onto a stool.

Sadie fixed his usual—rum and Coke—and set it on the bar, then leaned forward to tip her head conspiratorially toward Bryce. “Kane said he’s going to fire me,” she told the retired electrician.

Bryce’s expression brightened, but that could’ve been due to the fact that Sadie’s pose gave him an excellent view of her cleavage. “Fired shmired.” He sipped his drink, then patted Sadie’s hand. “Quit this dump—”

“Funny how this being a dump hasn’t stopped you from parking yourself on that stool every Saturday night for the past one hundred years,” Kane said.

Bryce, eighty if he was a day, and a regular long before Kane had ever set foot inside O’Riley’s—hell, before Kane, or even his father, had been born—glared, then turned back to Sadie. “You can work for my grandson,” he told her. “He’s a good boy. Respectful of his elders and his paying customers.”

Kane pulled yet another beer. “Last week you said he was lazy, ungrateful and running the company you’d built into the ground. You called him an idiot who’d touched one live wire too many and fried his brain.”

Bryce lowered his eyebrows. “At least he’s smart enough to appreciate good employees.”

“I am undervalued and underappreciated,” Sadie agreed with a sigh that was pure heartfelt drama. “I would quit in a heartbeat, but if I wasn’t around, poor Kane would miss me—”

“Poor Kane?” he mumbled, seriously considering sticking her head under the beer tap and giving her a good dousing. “Jesus Christ.”

She batted her eyelashes at him. “And I’d hate to see a grown man as pretty as him cry.”

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

“So I’ve been told,” she said cheerfully. She blew him a kiss. “You know you adore me.”

The worst part? It was true.

“I’m heading to the back of the bar,” he said. “Give you and that big head of yours more room.”

He really should fire her, he thought, as he made his way to the other end of the bar. She was flighty and unreliable, showed up for most of her shifts late, and took too many breaks when she was working.

She was also a great bartender, cheerful and chatty, always ready with a joke, a compliment or a sympathetic ear.